It is a rare opportunity indeed to meet someone who deeply understands the connect between ourselves and the living planet, and is taking direct action in terms of mobilising people into planting millions of trees, whilst simultaneously giving the practical tools to profoundly change one’s own inner wellbeing.

Sadhguru travels around the world spreading his message of peace and the need for ‘inner engineering’ or change – from global forums such as the World Economic Forum at Davos, World Peace Congress and United Nations Millennium Peace Summit, right to villages in the heart of rural India.

On Earth Day 2012 Sadhguru had said,

“How audacious that we can even think that we will allot a day for the earth! Both day and night happen only because of the revolutions of the earth. Our very body is an extract from this planet. Everything that we are is earth. For human beings who have forgotten that they have just temporarily come out of the womb of this earth and that they will one day be sucked back into this earth, for them, this day is a reminder that you are a part of this earth. If humanity has to live for a long time, you have to think like the earth, act like the earth and be the earth, because that is what you are.

I am often asked by people, “Why is a spiritual leader, a yogi, planting trees?” Why? Because trees are our closest relatives. What they exhale, we inhale; what we exhale, they inhale and keep our lives going. It is just like the outer part of our lung. You cannot ignore your body if you want to live. The planet is in no way different from that. What you call “my body” is just a piece of this planet.

Here is the edited transcript for the above video interview with Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev:

Bhavani Prakash: Thank you Sadhguru, for speaking to us at EWTT, it’s a real honour for me to be here with you today. At EWTT, we raise awareness about environmental issues and also share stories of positive change. Sadhguru, you have spread peace and joy to millions of people all over the world and have specially initiated Project Green Hands, which is the largest tree planting initiative in India in the state of Tamil Nadu, with the objective of planting 114 million trees that will raise the tree cover to 33% (Sadhguru: We are not anywhere near the number!)

Bhavani Prakash:Why and how did you start the Project Green Hands? What is the progress so far?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: In the year 1998, United Nations- certain agencies from the United Nations made a prediction that by 2025, 60% of Tamil Nadu will be a desert. I did not like it, I don’t like any prediction because predictions take into account only the cold facts, not human aspirations. What is beating in human heart is ignored completely. But I wanted to confirm, so I drove around Tamil Nadu to see if this is true. Then I came to the conclusion that they are wrong because in my estimate it wouldn’t go upto 2025, it would happen much faster.

Rivers which have been there for thousands of years have evaporated in the last twenty years; water table has sunk over thousand feet in many places and desertification is bound to happen very very rapidly. So I thought, what is the best thing to do? The simplest thing to do is, with global warming, temperature rise is happening. We made a calculation if there is increase in half a degree centrigrade of temperature, how many millions of tons of extra evaporation will happen to the oceans. If that many tons of water get evaporated where does it go? It all becomes cloud cover. One of the things that happens is the peninsula which is southern India, will receive excessive rain. When rain happens, without the necessary vegetative cover over it, without the green cover over it, the top soil will go away very quickly and the run off will create deserts very fast. It’s not ‘no rain’ which creates desert, it’s excessive rain without green top (that) will create. So the simple solution was to increase the green cover.

Tamil Nadu green cover on that day was 16.5%. National aspiration is 33%, so we made a barefoot calculation. If we need to make it 33% for the area of Tamil Nadu, we needed 114 million trees. So when I said 114 million trees, people thought I don’t know what the number is. We have over 62 million population. If all of us plant one tree, nurture it for 2 years and plant one more, we got the number. But such things never happen because efforts are never made in that direction. But people thought this was an impossible number.

So as a demonstration, I wanted to just give them the thrill of doing something which works. The mountain where we are, we are at the foothills of a mountain, this particular hill which immediately behind ashram turns brown in the month of April and May. Because in this mountain, there is no single tree over 20 years of age – they have removed everything. The rest of the mountain is very thick rain forest, this particular hill is like this. Because there was illegal furniture industry taking away the timber we kind of stopped that process. It took a certain amount of social upheaval to stop it but we did. So then I devised a way of planting over this hill during rainy season.

It just took us about 22 to 23 days, about 4 to 5 thousand volunteers and I had to just provide them 2 meals a day and just had to create a song to keep the enthusiasm up and we planted up this hill. Over 6 million seeds, we planted in a certain way ensuring that the sprouting would be almost 100%. But because of the wildlife certain amount will die. This whole hill became green in 2 years time. Today, if you come and see, you will see in summer months, it will not turn brown. Our temperatures have come by at least 3 degrees in summer because of this 22 days of work. So I gave them a demo that you don’t have to give up your life to do this. Making a mountain green, they thought they have to give up their life – so it was a kind of a demo and then they got enthusiastic.

Then I went about speaking to farmer groups and villages. The simple message that I gave them is just this. As you sit here and breathe, what you exhale the trees are inhaling, what the trees exhale you are inhaling. This is a partnership. This is a relationship without which you cannot do. You can do without any other relationship but this relationship you cannot break or in other words, one half of your lung is hanging out there in the tree. So it’s not a tree, its part of your breathing equipment. So this message went across to people. They emotionally felt that this is something they have to do because one part of the lungs is hanging out there in tree and have to take care of it. If they want to healthy, if they want to be happy, if they want to live well, if their children have to live well, this has to be done. This is something they understood.

Today, I think we have close to 17 million surviving trees which has brought in almost over 7% green cover back to the state. This is the official figure. The google maps say it’s much more. So a big movement started and many people started planting. The awareness that this has to happen has almost reached the whole population. The media and people came out in big numbers. The call for green hands planting this year – this is our 30th year – I told them you have to plant 30 lakh trees, that is 3 million trees, but people came back with a plan and said they will plant 6 million trees. So I said fine. This year they are planting 6 million trees, so about 1,100 nursery across the state in private lands and donated lands, no government help. Planting is not happening in government land – all on private land. We convinced the farmer that he has to convert 10% of his farming land into trees. More food should come out of trees than crops. Right now the proportion is disproportionate so that’s what we are working towards.

Bhavani Prakash: In another interview, you had said that you spent a lot of time, many years, to work on planting trees in people’s minds…..

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: Yes, that is the most difficult terrain (laughs).

Bhavani Prakash: ….. before you got them to plant trees in soil.

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: Planting trees in the soil is easy because soil likes trees and trees like soil (laughs). But planting trees in people’s minds was the big job. The first six years that’s all we did – planting trees in people’s minds. But now that it’s rooted in people’s minds, it’ll happen on the land quite effortlessly as six million trees in not a small number.

Bhavani Prakash:How did you do that? How did you engage with communities and also what do you see the impact now on these communities?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: As I said, it became an experiential process, people understood that their existence is not separate from the trees. We put it across in an experiential way through skits, through plays, through songs, through videos and celebrities coming and talking about it. We organised whole events across Tamil Nadu, so it became clear to people, ordinary people, village people, people who are everyday struggling for their livelihood. These are the people who did it, it’s not some big corporation or some other great sponsorship, it’s ordinary people on the street.

Bhavani Prakash: One question that is asked about tree planting initiatives is the choice of trees and the long term maintenance of the trees. So how does the program ensure this?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: The choice of trees in not our choice, its indigenous trees. We have chosen 108 indigenous trees – only trees which are local. We don’t bring anything from outside. The survival rate is because we don’t allow anybody to plant more than 2 trees. 2 children will plant one tree in partnership. So right now, we have taken up this in the schools is a big way, where 2 children in partnership will grow one tree – which is doable. If you make a person plant a hundred trees or a thousand trees, invariably he is not going to take care of it unless he has resources to do it. But 2 trees is something that he will take care of, so generally give them 3 and say you must plant 2 and encourage one more person to plant one. So this has set forth a whole culture today. You will see in Tamil Nadu in weddings people are giving away saplings instead of coconut. People are coming and taking from us, which is a significant change. How many of this (the) wedding guest will actually plant? The thing is we don’t just give it away, we are also kind of encouraging as to how to plant, what to do and things. Even if they don’t, just the shift in culture from giving a coconut or a fruit or something else, they have shifted to give a live sapling. When a grown plant is given to you, you can’t just throw it like this and go. There is a certain involvement in that and plantings happen. So we are also making sure that they receive that and if they say ‘I don’t know where to plant,’ we take it and plant it for them.

Bhavani Prakash:We spend money in so many frivolous ways, and as you mentioned, in unwanted gifts for various occasions such as festivals and birthdays and anniversaries. How can we encourage our friends and families (to plant trees instead)?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev : You must do it. It’s very, very important, that sensible and meaningful gifts are given, not frivolous and meaningless gifts. So we have set up a website which says “Give Isha.” So through giveisha.org/pgh people can (donate) either for their own birthday or friend’s birthday or children’s birthday or other occasions.

Bhavani Prakash: Apart from the scientific importance of trees which are important for combating climate change, recycling air and water…..

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: No, no, we are not combating climate change -yes, that will be a consequence. We plant trees because we understand it’s deeply, deeply connected with our lives, so the science of breath for one and in many other ways is connected. So the relationship is far more than just its utility, it’s life. Without our life they can survive, without their life we cannot survive.

And as you know in the past, most people got enlightened under a tree so we are also building infrastructure for your enlightenment. You better plant one now, just in case you are planning to get enlightened. At least you must have a decent tree to sit under. Otherwise nobody will believe….

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: (laughs) If you got enlightened in your bedroom, nobody will believe you. At least you must be sitting under a tree. (Laughs)

Bhavani Prakash: InAsia and in most ancient cultures of the world, we grew up with a feeling of reverence for nature and mother earth and that’s fast disappearing in this new age on consumerism and greed, fuelled by rapid economic growth. How can we regain the emotional connect, that love and respect for the earth?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: It has to be brought forth in children, in the education systems. We are looking at the planet as a commodity. We are not looking at it as a source of our life, which is a serious, serious mistake and an extremely crass way of existence. So, if you look at your mother as a delivery system for you, it’s a very gross way of existence. If you look at the planet as commodity, it’s a very gross way of existence. It’s time this is conveyed to the children of the planet because they are the future generations and if that has it happen, then this generation has to get it too first. It has to spread the message it’s very, very important.

Bhavani Prakash: If we continue business as usual it is estimated that by end of this century …

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: A century…you think it will last that long? (laughs)

Bhavani Prakash: (laughs and continues)…it’s expected that the planet will become warmer by 4 to 6 degrees Celsius …

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: Singapore won’t exist (then) (laughs)

Bhavani Prakash: What action needs to be taken urgently by every sector of society – by individuals, organisations, communities, policy makers? What action needs to be taken to prevent catastrophic consequences? Can we avert calamity? Is it inevitable? Do we have enough time to act?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: One thing is (that) the way we consume the planet has to change. You can’t stop it. It has to change for which breakthrough technologies need to happen. Another important thing is and one of the most immediate things is to plant trees. Particularly planting trees is effective only up to 33 degrees from the equator, north and south. But south of the equator there isn’t much land to plant, expect Africa and certain parts of America. Nowhere else there is land, but in the north, there is plenty of land. So southern India or large segment of India falls into that, Singapore in that range and many other countries are there. Upto 33 degrees from the equator is the most effective place to plant trees. If you plant it in temperate climates, it will not contribute in a very big way to the climate change process. But maximum impact happens here so that is where we need to plant. These lands which are within 33 degrees on either side of the equator, this is where we must plant maximum trees. Because this where it makes the difference.

This is an immediate remedy or (rather) it’s not a remedy, it’s a small correction. But if we don’t even make this small correction then (with) other things such as technological breakthroughs, nobody can predict the time. It may happen this year or it may happen a century later. We don’t know when it will happen. We definitely need to invest in that direction but there is no guarantee as to when it will happen. So planting trees is something we can do and see that it happens and the impact is immediately visible. Consuming less in so many ways has to be done, technologies have to be improved but those things will not happen immediately. They can take time.

Bhavani Prakash: I suppose we must also conserve what we have? We are losing so much forest within this tropical belt….

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: That’s what I said. You cannot reduce consumption without technological advancement, it will not happen. You can only talk about it. It’s not going to happen, because you cannot curtail human aspirations. But you can curtail human population. The tree population should increase, human population has to come down. We have bred irresponsibly.

In the last 100 years i.e., in the beginning of the century we were just 1.5 billion. Today we are 7 billion plus. United Nations is making predictions that by 2050 we will be 9.6 billion people. 9.6 billion people means we will have to live with 40% less resource than what we are enjoying now. When I say resource, I am not talking about oil or gold or something. I am talking about food that you eat, water that you drink and air that you breathe. This is going to be serious problem. So 9.6 billion people in another 40 years, not even 40, in 36 years, is a dangerous bomb sitting in front of us. Either we curtail this consciously or Nature is going to do it to us in a very cruel manner. If we do it consciously we can call ourselves human beings. If Nature does it us, we are just creatures on this planet.

Bhavani Prakash: Sadhguru, what is true happiness and joy…..?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: No, no this is not ecological. (Smiles)

Bhavani Prakash: (Smiles)No, I am going to link it…

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: How can you sit on a tree and be happy? You have to be a monkey. (Laughs)

Bhavani Prakash: How can we connect this notion of individual happiness and joy to the wellbeing of all fellow human beings, the wellbeing of all species on this planet, the health of all ecosystems?

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: Don’t worry about the happiness of other beings, if you keep this one being happy (pointing to himself), no really…. If you are in a certain state of pleasantness within you, you will be pleasant to everything around you, invariably isn’t it? When you are happy, are you not nice to people around you? But when you are unhappy are you very nice? So people are too concerned about fixing the world. No, you fix this (pointing to himself), if this is feeling pleasant, it will naturally be pleasant to everything. So the problem is always – we want to fix the world and then fix this (oneself). It won’t happen, it’s only going to be talk.

Bhavani Prakash:Finally, there is saying that goes like this: ”Hope without action is just wishful thinking.” Conversely, action without hope is impossible to sustain. So how can those who are really passionate about doing better for the world, encourage others to take action, impactful action, without losing hope.

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev: The thing is, your action should not be based on hope. Your action should be based on your clarity of vision. You know this needs to be done, so you do it. Is it going to happen or not going to happen, that’s not your business. Your business is that you did everything possible that needs to be done. Is it going to happen or is it not going to happen? If you calculate that now, you will give it up tomorrow morning.

That’s not necessary. (Whether) It is going to happen or not going to happen is subject to many things, but did you do what you could do or not, is the basic thing. So every human being has to look at this. “Oh it’s ok, if I plant a tree, is the world going to change?” Whether it changes or not, it’s just that out your concern you have done everything that you can do. You have not left anything undone. Always this is so in one’s life. In every human being’s life, if you do not do what you cannot do, that’s not the issue. If you do not what you can do, that’s a disastrous life. So my wish is that no human being should become a disaster. Every human being should do what he can do. What he cannot do….nobody can do what he cannot do. (laughs)

Bhavani Prakash: Thank you Sadhguru for your wonderful words of wisdom and guidance.

Dr. Tom Crompton is a Change Strategist at World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) UK, and if you’re intrigued by his job description, suffice it to say he has been involved in some cutting-edge research on going to the heart of what should be the approach of communication campaigns – of environmental organisations and those of the non-profit sector in general.

EWTT: How did your interest in human psychology and environmentalism evolve?

Dr. Tom Crompton: I have worked at WWF-UK for ten years .The first five years, I worked on international trade and investment policy – for example, World Trade Organisation (WTO) law. I was convinced then and am still convinced now that the international trade regime is crucially important from the sustainability perspective to ensure that we are producing and trading in more sustainable products with lower carbon footprints. Several senior negotiators were themselves deeply convinced for the need for more fundamental change to the trade regime on a sustainability basis but they’d say, “look, our hands are tied, we don’t enjoy the political space, we don’t experience public political pressure for more proportional change” and as a result the change that we saw was small.

I think that forced us really to reflect on what is it that creates political space and pressure for more proportional change, what is it that motivates people to engage with the political process, whether it is to lobby with members of parliament or to demonstrate on the streets or however else they may express their political frustration. Some social psychologists came back to us and said that one of the things they see as missing at the moment from environmental campaigning or indeed third sector campaigning generally, is an understanding of values and the importance of values in underpinning people’s commitment to engage in political process and to express concern about social and environmental issues.

Dr. Tom Crompton: We’re working to open debate with a wide range of third sector organizations – not just environmental organizations but also development and disability organizations, children’s charities and animal welfare charities – about the cultural values that seem to consistently underpin expression of concern about a wide range of social and environmental issues.

One implication of this work is that we should be designing or shaping our campaigns and communications, and indeed our entire external engagement, in a way which helps to engage and strengthen those values. These are values which almost everybody seems to hold already. It’s a question of bringing them to the fore, because they underpin not just our concern about environmental issues, but also the concern about a wide range of other social issues.

It seems that when we activate what psychologists call extrinsic values -which are concerns about things like wealth or social status or image, those values tend to suppress the importance that people attach to intrinsic values, or values associated with social and environmental concerns.

So there is an antagonistic relationship between these two sets of values. From that we suggest it is important that NGOs think carefully about the occasions in which they may be drawn to appeal to extrinsic values in the course of pursuing a particular campaign outcome. For example, drawing attention to the money that might be saved through increased energy conservation measures like turning down the central heating thermostat or drawing attention to the social image or status that might be achieved through buying a luxury hybrid car. These are messages that may be effective in encouraging uptake of that particular behavior but are likely to have collateral damages.

This work also points to the possibility of beginning to work across a wide range of NGOs in new coalitions, with groups which hitherto have not really collaborated. Many NGOs can find common cause to engage those more intrinsic values and begin to tackle and remove those things which tend to engage and strengthen extrinsic values.

For example, we might find common cause in tackling an influence which currently serves to strengthen unhelpful extrinsic values at a cultural level, namely, the impact of advertising. We have begun to build a coalition of NGOs working again on a very wide set of issues to ask what’s the role of advertising in potentially frustrating emergence of greater public engagements and more stronger expressions of public concern on all of our issues. But we might also work to help strengthen intrinsic values – for example, working with those who set the standards for teacher-training to introduce work to help children reflect on the importance of kindness in their lives.

Image Courtesy: ValuesandFrames.org

EWTT: Our society has become so materialistic. Is there a danger that there may be no common ground if we don’t address the ‘what’s in it for me?’ Are people going to listen to messages for less materialistic values?

Dr. Tom Crompton: There are several dimensions to that question and it is a very critical question. You wouldn’t embark on what we are suggesting unless you are convinced that the problems we confront are really quite immense and will require really fundamental changes in terms of the level of ambition we show to respond to those problems.

If you really believed that a few behavioural changes in the private sphere in terms of domestic energy efficiency savings or a bit of green consumption were going to be sufficient to tackle a problem like climate change, or if you believe that increasing people’s willingness to donate to development charities was really going to be sufficient to tackle the problem of global poverty, then you probably look at what we are proposing and suggest that it is too ambitious.

So the first thing to say is that the scale of challenge that we are confronting at the moment would require an ambitious response and at the moment we are not seeing that level of ambition.

The second thing to say is that whilst it’s true that on some indicators, it seems that some cultures are becoming more materialistic, and are holding those extrinsic values to be more important, in most nations, people still hold intrinsic values to be more important. In the UK, if you ask people what’s important to them they first and foremost mention those intrinsic values. They voice the importance of the connection to friends and family, they talk about self- direction, the importance of self -determination and creativity, they talk about sense of social justice and the sense of environmental concern. Extrinsic values such as wealth or power rate less importantly. The evidence also seems very clear that these intrinsic values are there in everybody to be engaged.

We recently conducted a study with psychologists from University of Cardiff where we took 750 ordinary citizens from the Cardiff community, and asked them what values were important to them, we gave them a value survey and we picked the top 10% for whom the extrinsic or materialistic values were most important.

We then asked half of these people to reflect for a few minutes on the importance of affiliation to friends and family, the importance of broad-mindedness. We made no mention of the environment. We asked the other half to reflect on the importance of wealth or popularity. Then we interviewed each participant about climate change, amongst other things. We transcribed the interviews and sent them a linguist who analysed the interviews without knowing whether a participant had been asked to think about intrinsic or extrinsic values.

We found that even though these people were by disposition more inclined towards extrinsic values, simply asking them to pause for a few minutes to reflect on the importance of affiliation towards friends and family or broadmindedness led to a statistically significant increase in the extent to which they saw climate change as being something that they felt they had some personal responsibility to address and something that they wanted to see addressed because of its importance for a wider society and not just for their own self- interest.

What we take from an experiment like that, and it corroborates several other lines of evidence, is that those intrinsic values matter for a lot for people and that it’s possible to engage them even in the short term. We are not necessarily talking here about changing in values. It’s more about thinking carefully about which values people already hold, which of these underpin a greater commitment to express social or environmental concern, and engaging with these in the course of our campaigns or communications.

EWTT: Companies often say they are bound by short-term results, such as sales targets or increasing shareholder returns, which relate to the extrinsic values you talk about. They tend to initiate sustainability initiatives only if it makes financial sense. How do you convince them to undertake them because it’s the right thing to do?

Dr. Tom Crompton: It is a challenge certainly. What we are suggesting goes beyond the business case for sustainability. It goes beyond simply pointing to those things that it’s in a business’s short-term economic interests to do, for example increasing energy efficiency or supply chain efficiency in a way which will simultaneously save money. We need to move to a situation where the responsibility that companies have to the societies in which they operate is seen to extend beyond simply making money.

Many companies are already demonstrating willingness to go beyond the business case for sustainable development and are taking unilateral action. It is of course easier for family owned companies or cooperatives to do that than it is for publicly owned companies, but even in the case of publically owned companies there are examples where at the very least they come together and demand a regulatory intervention or legislative intervention in order to shift the level of the playing field. In the UK, The Prince of Wales’ Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change calls of government to enact new and longer-term policies to tackle climate change. Members of this group recognise that some steps to tackle climate change incur economic costs. But if together they can change the level of the playing field then these competitive costs could be equally shared across the competitors.

The other thing is to widen our concept of what corporate social responsibility means, to recognize that companies have a responsibility not just with immediate material foot prints of their activities – how much carbon do they produce, how much tropical rainforest is cut down in the course of them sourcing their raw materials – but also with what you might call mindprint. Mindprint includes impacts on cultural values, and that’s affected in a whole range of ways: the way in which a company advertises, the values that are activated in the course of using the products it manufactures, or how a company manages decision making processes. These include their HR practices and internally recognizing that many people work for business and that it is an important part of their lives. When you spend 40 hours a week in a business, the culture of that business is likely to impact your values as an individual. So there is a whole range of ways in which we are arguing businesses have a responsibility to look at not only their footprints but also their mindprint, which may be even greater than the impact that they have through their direct environment impacts – their footprint.

EWTT: Can businesses exploit intrinsic values in their advertising, and can this cause harm?

Dr. Tom Crompton: Many businesses are well aware of the importance of intrinsic values in building a loyal customer base and clearly those intrinsic values are the ones often reflected in terms of a company’s brand or its advertising. A lot of advertising appeals to intrinsic values in terms of strength of family relationships or connection to nature. The report we produced last year called ‘Think of Me as Evil’ was an attempt to open some of these ethical debates as they relate to advertising. Nobody knows for sure what the cultural or social impact of advertising that appeals to intrinsic values are, but some of the social psychologists we have worked with constructed quite persuasive arguments that actually such ads may be unhelpful. What these ads may actually serve to do is to increase people’s cynicism about intrinsic values or to create the impression that those values, when they come from elsewhere, are being deployed manipulatively in order to get them to do something; whether that’s to buy a product or to show some act of kindness. So it seems that there are dangers in deploying intrinsic values in pursuit of commercial interest.

EWTT: What about the behaviour or governments? How do you convince governments to look for alternative indicators of growth outside of GDP or overcome their fear of losing competitive advantage?

Dr. Tom Crompton: I agree with you fully on this. Those were precisely the constraints we hear from senior policy makers or decision makers in the trade regime. We would be arguing that at least for us in the UK we should be taking a unilateral stand in multilateral negotiations in order to help change the regime. What we hear constantly is that, “Oh well, we don’t have the political capital”, or “there would be competitiveness costs to the industry”: exactly the arguments which you have just been advancing. I suppose I just come back again to our starting point. One of our responses to that degree of political paralysis is that the change we need isn’t going to occur without far more vocal and powerful citizen engagement. It isn’t going to happen unless more people are writing to their MPs, or unless more people are out in the streets demonstrating; unless it is made clear to the political leaders that their own political future depends upon being more ambitious in responding to these things – even though there are economic costs. So our question at the outset was: What is it that underpins increased citizen engagement? What is it that underpins citizen concern? And this brings us back to values. If a diversity of third sector organizations come together to ask how it is that our cultural values influence our collective responses to social and environmental problems, they could have a profound impact on public debate.

Policy makers don’t enjoy the political space and public pressure for more ambitious change. So this whole work from the outset has been premised on the grounds that we need to find ways to increase public engagement on these issues. I don’t think governments are ready to embrace the scale of response that is necessary to respond to the challenges. But that said, there are certainly opportunities for governments within this and we have been engaging several governments on precisely this agenda.

The Welsh government is, for example, currently asking what are the narratives they have set down nationally within Wales around sustainable development? They have recognized that they have adopted a series of environmental policies in a piecemeal fashion, so we have a charge on plastic bags, for example, but they recognize as well that there are some fundamental limitations to what you can achieve by picking individual actions which are often quite modest in terms of their environmental impacts. They see the need for some sort of national narrative around sustainable development. Should this be constructed around the economic opportunities early investment in green technologies such as wind provides, that might give a country a competitive edge? Or should it be built around a sense that Wales has something important to contribute to the world as a small country that is light on its feet and has a strong sense of community and social justice? Clearly, I would argue for the latter.

In the case of the UK government, we are hearing that they too are frustrated by the limitations of a piecemeal approach to reducing individual’s carbon footprint for example. So they are confronting the fact that whilst they may urge people to insulate their loft on the basis that they will save money, they are finding at the same time that if people are insulating their loft solely to save money, there is no particular reason why the money that they save shouldn’t be spent in turning the central heating thermostat up and enjoying a warmer house or flying off to enjoy a weekend break: all of which are more carbon intensive activities. We have to look carefully at the values we are appealing to in trying to change private-sphere behaviours.

EWTT: What do you have to say about the way one should engage on social media?

Dr. Tom Crompton: Social media is only one way in which third sector organizations impact on cultural values, albeit an important one, and the most easily changed. I think that there are many others, including policies that they are campaigning for, the way in which they campaign, the way in which they organize their own organizations and their own internal policies.

Online groups might begin to look at the values that they appeal to in the course of constructing their online requests for people to sign petitions: what’s the impact of these values on the longevity of people’s engagement, and the success with which they encourage people to actually sign the petition?

My expectation would be that they would be likely to build a more loyal relationship with their supporters when that relationship is premised on connecting with people’s intrinsic rather than their extrinsic values. There may be instances where you can successfully encourage large numbers of people to sign a petition on the basis of their self- interest, but I would argue that those supporters are likely to express a less general, or less systemic concern about a wide range of social and environmental issues, particularly where those depart from their immediate self- interest, and they are likely to make for less durable relationships. They are likely to be more fickle.

EWTT: How do you intend to take your studies forward? What’s the broader vision for the kind of work you do?

Dr. Tom Crompton: Our aim is to engage in the first instance a wider swathe of NGOs in this debate. In the UK at least, there is a huge appetite for this at the moment. We have already run over 60 workshops for different NGOs in UK from a very wide range of different issue groups and interest groups. That work will continue in terms of engaging third sector organizations in this conversation. It’s increasingly becoming an international conversation. We recently ran a series of workshops in a number of Scandinavian countries as there is an appetite there to begin to put together hubs of NGOs who are working on these issues and building a conversation in those countries. We are going to be running workshops soon in Australia; we have got workshops in Brussels, possibly in Canada so there is an increasing international interest which we haven’t really gone out to court, this is interest which has come to us really.

Part of what we are doing is deepening our already extensive relationship with academics on the evidence. Hitherto that evidence base has been drawn largely from social psychology but we are aware that social psychology represents only one route into this discussion. So we want to increasingly work with people from other disciplines, political science, psychotherapy, anthropology, and neurosciences and we are beginning that process. We are doing more research ourselves in terms of taking real NGO communications and asking what the impacts of those are. For example, we have put together a consortium of all the main UK conservation groups and we will be working with a psychologist and a linguist to analyse our entire external communication over a 6 month period to ask “what are the values that we are activating at the moment in the course of those communications”.

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About the Interviewer:

Michelle Desilets is Founder and Executive Director of Orangutan Land Trust, a UK-based NGO which supports sustainable solutions for the long-term survival of the orangutan in the wild. She is also Founder of Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation UK, and Member of the Board of Borneo Orangutan Survival Germany, which supports the largest primate rescue and protection project in the world.

She was in Singapore recently when she talked to us about the threats to orangutans, especially from the palm oil industry. Orangutan Land Trust is a key player in the campaign for sustainable palm oil, and Desilets shares some of the nuances in the debate about sustainable palm oil, the challenges in the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) process, and what would be more effective to save the rainforests – boycotting palm oil, or more direct action through petitions which influence industry and government behaviour.

Pavan Sukhdev, unlike most economists, has a strong passion to make Nature count. He’s on an important mission to enable governments, businesses and communities incorporate a sense of the true worth of nature’s services which historically has been taken for free.

Pavan Sukhdev

Pavan Sukhdev is Special Adviser to UNEP’s green economy initiative and lead author of the path-breaking study called The Economics of Ecosystem Biodiversity or TEEB. He is often called the ‘Nicholas Stern’ of biodiversity, striving as he does to put a value on it the way Stern did for climate change. All this while he’s on a sabbatical from Deutsche Bank where he is a senior banker.

His efforts may well provide a very important solution to the deep socio-environmental crises facing the planet – which he attributes to the triple factors of “market failure, information failure and institutional failure”. These have been a result of the obsession with economic growth, and the concomitant political systems which have evolved as a response to the industrial revolution and that are clearly out of sync with current environmental realities.

Sukhdev is not the first ‘environmental economist’ to put a price tag on ecosystem services or say that economic activity or prices do not fully reflect ‘externalities’ such as the cost of air or water pollution, or loss of oceans, atmosphere and biodiversity. Robert Constanza et al for instance, estimated the value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital at US$33 trillion in 1997.

However, Sukhdev is certainly behind a critical and visible momentum that is building up to operationalize this information and account for these ‘externalities’ in the National Income Accounting of countries as well as the balance sheet of companies, so that their true costs to society can be assessed and given weight.

This is also the first time a study the scale of TEEB has ever been done. Set up by UNEP in 2007 and steered by Pavan Sukhdev, the study was carried out with over 500 scientists and 225 co-authors. The report highlighted various dimensions to the issue of biodiversity, including the importance of investing in ecological infrastructure, and how critical biodiversity is to the poor of the world.

The Bank of Natural Capital is an advisory website that is part of the TEEB study. It shows how and why to value nature. The TEEB Synthesis Report , launched at the 10th meeting of the Convention of Biological Diversity, Nagoya (COP-10) , Japan illustrates how the various economic concepts and tools described in TEEB can assist society to incorporate the values of nature into decision-making at all levels.

So what is the world worth? Or rather why should we value nature and bring it into the balance sheet of a nation or of companies?

* We are operating beyond the carrying capacity of Nature, or the ability of nature to regenerate itself. For 2006, humanity’s total ecological footprint was estimated at 1.4 planet Earths – in other words, humanity uses ecological services 1.4 times as fast as Earth can renew them. This is like drawing down our bank balance of natural resources – by living off our ‘natural capital’ instead of from the interest.

* What we don’t measure we can’t manage. This is the reason we are losing invaluable resources in the form of ecosystem services. Unless you put a price tag on nature – its forests, coral reefs and mangrove swamps, we are not going to be able to save it. The idea is beginning to catch up.Last year for example, the World Bank’s 5-year study to incorporate the value of ecosystems into countries’ national income accounts, was an outcome of Nagoya COP-10, Japan. Colombia and India are to be the first countries to value their natural capital. Even businesses are slowly warming up to the idea.

The EU isn’t far behind. Its 2020 biodiversity strategy is going to account for nature. According to UK government’s National Ecosystem Assessment, looking after all the UK’s green spaces is worth the sum of £30bn a year to the economy. Bob Watson, chief scienific adviser to DEFRA and co-author of the report, said the assessment should be used to shape government policy at the national and local level. “Putting a value on these natural services enables them to be incorporated into policy in the same way that other factors are. We can’t persist in thinking of these things as free.”

* The top 3,000 public companies in the world were responsible for$ 2.25 trillion worth of environmental damage, which represent 33% of the profits of these companies. This is private profit at the cost of public wealth. Some pioneering businesses are taking the cue to calculate these costs. PUMA is one of the world’s first companies to adopt environmental accounting to show the full impact of its use of ecosystem services.

* According to TRUCOST,global environmental damage caused by human activity as estimated by UNEP Finance Initiative and Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI) in 2008 costUS$ 6.6 trillion/year(or 11% of 2008 GDP).Those global costs are 20% larger than the $ 5.4 trillion decline in the value of pension funds in developed countries caused by the global financial crisis in 2007/8.

The global environmental damage is estimated to be $28 trillion by 2050. Five sectors account for about 60% of environmental costs– electricity, oil and gas producers, industrial metals & mining, food producers, construction & materials. Certainly these are numbers not to be taken lightly.

* Economics only measures manmade capital, while ignoring human and natural capital. If we do not assign economic values to nature, society as a whole will be making wrong trade-offs. Sometimes the issue goes beyond economics into the realm of ethical choices. Take coral reefs for example. Sukhev says in the video below called, “What is the world worth”:“The problem is that at today’s targeting in Copenhagen, or for that matter in the climate process, we are targeting a level of carbon dioxide which most scientists believe is too high for coral reefs to survive on an ongoing basis. Scientists have given us numbers of 320 ppm, 350, 380 ppm – only one has given us a number of 480, which is higher than where we are targeting. So there is an issue here that, you know, we are probably making a societal choice, as a community, to not have coral reefs. Can economics save this? No, we can’t. The last coral reef is probably worthless because, you know, it just is too precious to put a price on. So we can’t actually apply the logic of economics and marginal value when you’re coming to the last unit of what’s left. And that’s where you need to make an ethical choice. So here we have it. We have an ethical choice. Sadly, this is an ethical choice which we are making kind of unconsciously, if you know what I mean. We’ve sort of stepped into it and made that choice without necessarily having thought through the consequences.”

* Nature is very important for the most vulnerable sections of society – a point that Sukhdev often makes. In Sukhdev’s words,” We may dismiss ecosystem services as only ’10-20% of GDP’, but they are actually ‘50-90% of the GDP of the poor’. Preserving ecosystem services is critical for the livelihood of the poor.

For a detailed understanding of the issue, do watch the excellent and comprehensive talk by Pavan Sukdhev at the Sydney Opera House. It was organised by Centre for Policy Development (CPD), Australia.

The full transcript of the speech has been generously made available by CPD here.

About the writer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk.com, an economist in her previous avatar, who also strongly believes that nature should be made to count. She’s a sustainability writer, trainer and speaker and can be contacted at bhavani[at] ecowalkthetalk.com Join EWTT on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Shailendra Yashwant is Campaign Director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia and founding member of the Greenpeace offices in India and Southeast Asia. The Southeast Asia office manages about 120 staff including campaigners and fund raisers.

Based in Bangkok, Yashwant currently oversees a range of campaigns including climate change, renewable energy, forests, clean water and sustainable agriculture in the Southeast Asian region. He is an award winning photojournalist, and has been involved with key environmental movements in India, Nepal and Bangladesh before he joined Greenpeace in 1998.

Greenpeace International, with offices in over 40 countries is one of the world’s leading non-governmental environmental organisations. It takes no corporate sponsorship or government grants, with its entire funding sourced directly from the general public.

Yashwant talked to us during his visit to Singapore last month, where he had been invited as a speaker at the first ever Climate Change Summit for the Asia’s Insurance Industry.

BP: How do you see the various faces of Greenpeace, whose activism can range from “in your face” demonstrations that often gives it an eco-terrorist image, to “pin-striped suit” negotiations with businesses and governments?

SY: Greenpeace celebrates its 40th anniversary in October 2011. Fortunately, our core value of non-violence is such a solid part of our profile for the last 4 decades that the eco-terrorist label never sticks – it’s like water off duck’s back, really .

Our campaigning has always been based on an IDEAL approach – Investigate, Document, Expose, take Action and Lobby. We are well known for our meticulous investigations and systematic scientific research.

We even we have an independent science lab based in the University of Exeter in England and in fact we are considering setting up a science unit for Southeast Asia in Singapore, if we get the permission to do so .

Lobbying is an important part of our campaigning style. In fact, we are as comfortable in our orange overalls while taking direct action as we are in pin-striped suits which we have to wear regularly to engage with executives of our targets companies, senior government officials and attend UN conferences where we have observer status.

I remember the first UN meeting I attended, when we demanded a ban on all F-gases. That’s the first intervention that Greenpeace or any international environmental organisation for that matter did on climate change. Greenpeace has even developed solutions like GreenFreeze , the world’s first CFC free refrigerator that is now a norm in the industry.

BP: How has Greenpeace evolved over the years?

SY: Our style of protests also known as direct action, has certainly changed and evolved. We still protest at the sites of environmental crime to show what is endangered or threatened , like chaining ourselves to bulldozers in forests or blocking pipes that release toxic effluents in rivers.

What has evolved in last four decades is the technology and lately we’ve begun using the power of social network to involve more people in our protests.

In 2009 we ran a hugely successful online campaign targeting Unilever. We made a spoof video of their television commercial for Dove soap, to bring attention to the fact that products like soap, shampoo, chocolates used palm oil, a product that came from forest destruction in places like Indonesia. We were demanding that multinational companies like Unilever, Nestle and others stop buying palm oil from companies that were involved in forest destruction for expanding their plantations in Indonesia.

It was amazing to see the video viral on social networks with more than 300,000 people writing to Unilever echoing our demands. The company had very little choice but to listen to the demands of their consumers.

We repeated this tactic with the Kitkat campaign targeting Nestle on the same issue with tremendous results again last year.

Our business is to communicate the environmental crisis, and to reach out to more and more people to engage on these critical issues. We think that reaching out to huge numbers is now possible.

Read also the latest success of Greenpeace’s campaign here to get palm oil conglomerate Golden Agri Resources, to commit not to clear peatlands and forests of High Conservation Value]

BP: Do you also find that the attitudes of governments and businesses have changed over the years, especially towards Greenpeace?

SY: Absolutely. This paradigm shift that everyone is talking about has already started happening. I think that governments are willing to listen because the impacts are obvious.

Industrial effluents at Vapi (Photo by Shailendra Yashwant)

For example, in the state of Gujarat in India, at what is known as the Golden Corridorthat stretches from Vapi to Ankleshwar– a major hub of chemical industries , that manufactures intermediary chemical compounds for export.

We began investigating by first documenting impacts, by taking pictures of red cows and blue dogs, and farmers and fishermen suffering from skin diseases. Later we tested water in the rivers to discover high toxic content due to direct release of effluents from the chemical factories. We released the results of our investigations, including the pictures and then took direct action by blocking pipes that were discharging in the rivers. Nothing happened. We were pushed back from Gujarat.

A few years later, the number of women suffering from miscarriages increased dramatically and an alarming rise in health disorders were reported. That got people worried. Now they were calling for the reports that were released 10 years earlier about the harmful effects of dyes and chemicals released in the rivers. The local Pollution Control Board is actually now on our side. The first 5 years, they were against me. So you see these little shifts. They are not tectonic but they are happening. We are not anywhere near saving the planet yet of course.

BP: How is your current campaign against deforestation in Indonesia shaping up in the context of REDD-plus? What kind of legal or market frameworks would you like to see in place?

SY: First of all, we want all stakeholders to be involved. We can’t just have governments and businesses sitting down together without the indigenous peoples and communities, local government and civil society. These people have to be involved for any decision making. Don’t jump into the carbon markets and make promises, but involve all stakeholders. Don’t give any more new concessions till such a joint discussion takes place. Also, don’t allow the existing concessions to be cleared. Before anything else, we need to reassess what is really left, what can be protected, put a value to the forests especially when it is reduced to this size. These three are key: stakeholder involvement, a moratorium that allows a full assessment, and in many parts of the world we don’t want the REDD or post Cancun money that is coming in to become an excuse for developed countries to continue emitting.

In fact, we’re saying only those countries which have shown a track record of reducing their carbon emissions should be allowed to participate in these schemes.
Nothing much happened in Cancun, by the way. We’re focussing now on the bilateral deals, for example, the Norway-Indonesia deal and the Australia-Indonesia deal only because you have to show the Indonesian government and the local governments and players that there is a value to standing forests. You can actually make money from a standing forest. It’s unfortunately all about money.

[Click here for the joint Friends of the Earth FOE and Greenpeace’s document, “REDD: The realities in black and white”]

BP: You’re also campaigning for increasing the uptake of renewable energies in the region. Where would you like to see change?

SY: We’d like to see governments revisiting their GDP projections, this growth-linked fossil fuel use projections. What are your real energy requirements, where are they going to come from? Stop thinking grid.

Netherlands is the best example of how each building or community has its own little energy production centre. They are therefore responsible for how it is run, whether it is polluting or not, whether it is green or not.

We want to see existing technology, not rocket science. Our Energy [R]evolution document shows there are existing technologies whether wind, solar, biomass, microhydro – all these alternative energy production systems that can meet our requirements.

SY: It is government subsidies to fossil fuel. And you can see that in many countries – the coal industry is practically running the governments, for example in Indonesia. After a lot of campaigning in India, they’ve declared ‘no go’ zones in Indian forests. The Indian Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh’s latest statement that we will protect Indian forests from coal mining in forests, which is very good. However, Indian companies such as the state owned Coal India and Tata Power in the private sector are now buying coal mines in Indonesia.

BP: Because you’re in charge of the Greenpeace Southeast Asia, you’re able to see what’s happening at a regional level more clearly!

SY: Absolutely. The biggest impediment to renewables is the clout of these industries.

BP: What are you thoughts on the Nuclear Liability Bill in India which seeks to limit the maximum liability in case of a nuclear accident?

SY: Everyone who is worried about this bill is genuinely worried. This is not only about hazards associated with nuclear waste and accidents, it’s also about public finance. Whose money are you spending?

No new nuclear power plant in the last 15 years has been built within the projected costs or within the projected time. Despite this, the massive public protest for the biggest nuclear power plant proposed in Jaitapur, India for 10,000MW is being suppressed.

BP: What are your ecological agriculture campaigns in Thailand and Phillipines?

Ifugao GMO free Rice Terraces in Phillipines

SY: While campaigning against GMOs, we’re working with a number of farmers in Thailand and the Philippines. On the rice terraces in Ifugao, Phillipines, we got the local government to announce it to be GM free. The area is a UN World Heritage site. The region has the best organic farmers for centuries.

Unfortunately, there are industries in the area waiting to sell their chemical fertilisers and pesticides, but we have blocked them. Right now our sustainable agriculture work is in blocking GMOs and spreading awareness about the effects of chemical fertilisers, not only on food, but also on water.

The biggest threat to water in Indonesia in fact, is the agriculture runoffs. So we’re still developing a larger campaign where we go beyond saying no to GMOs and talk about what organic and ecological agriculture really means, what sustainability actually means when applied practically.

[Click here to read more about Greenpeace Phillipines’ anti-GMO campaign]

BP: What are your plans for the region?

SY: In Southeast Asia, we currently have offices in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. In fact, Greenpeace Southeast Asia marked its 10 years of campaigning in the region in 2010. In the near future, we are looking into setting up offices in Singapore and Malaysia. We also have offices in India, East Asia which include China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.

BP: Could you tell us about the Mitra Foundation that you are personally involved with?

SY: Mitra Foundation is my pet project back home in India, where together with my wife and a few friends who call ourselves Mitras, have been helping educational campuses raise ‘energy conscience’ amongst their students by implementing energy efficiency measures while phasing in the use of renewable energy to meet the energy needs.

We have had modest success as at least 3 campuses in Bangalore and Pune, of the five that we have been working at. They have not only improved energy efficiency but also installed solar and micro wind energy systems.

We are very excited about setting up ‘solar libraries’ at Adivasi (indigenous people) schools of Dahanu in Maharashtra , who have no access to books or electricity. You can find out more about our work at www.mitrafoundation.org

BP: What gives you hope for the future?

SY:Personally, I get my energy from meeting young people around the world. It’s their dynamism, enthusiasm and excitement for a better tomorrow that keep me going.

You will agree that we have far more people alive today, due to better education and exposure to a variety of new ideas, techniques and methods. I believe that we have far more creative potential than ever before, which gives me hope that we can find whole new ways of living on the planet sustainably.

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com. She is passionate about the role of individuals and communities in bringing about the much needed change we need to see in the world. She was an economist in her previous avatar, and is now an environmental and social justice activist using social media as well as offline community participation in her advocacy of a greener, fairer and happier planet. She writes and conducts talks and workshops on sustainability and can be contacted at bhavani[at]ecowalkthetalk.com. Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook,Twitter, Linked IN and YouTube

4. BBC:Orangutan survival and the shopping trolley “Shailendra Yashwant, Greenpeace director for Southeast Asia, said this illegal logging is widespread and includes major suppliers to the UK’s food and household product market. ”We want the Indonesian government to immediately announce a moratorium on further deforestation…beginning with peat lands.”

Acknowledged by Time Magazine as one of the Heroes of the Environment in 2009 along with Martin Hartley and Ann Daniels, Hadow is part of the team which has been involved in cutting edge science, providing critical information to scientists on the thickness of Arctic ice. This enables more accurate predictions on how long the white polar cover will last.

He shares with us the incredible challenges of polar exploration, and at the same time, the profound implications of the data collected during the process and its findings, especially for Asia.

I managed to catch up with Hadow as he left the seminar for his next appointment. We got a bit lost finding the building and he quipped that you could never get lost in the North Pole, as there is only one direction in which to keep walking.

BP: How did you get interested in polar exploration?

PH: Our family has a strong connection with Captain Robert Falcon Scott who was the first person to explore Antarctica extensively by land. Captain Scott’s dying wish was for his wife to get their son interested in the natural world. Peter went on to set up WWF, the world’s largest environmental organisation.

Pen Hadow in the Arctic

Young Peter was brought up in a particular way, had a spartan regime and was left out in the cold in Britain with fewer and fewer clothes for longer and longer periods. This nanny looked after my dad when he was a young boy. The same nanny who was now in her 80s looked after me as a boy, with a similar regime of induction to the cold. I grew up on the stories of Scott and Shackleton who were my heroes.

BP: How did polar exploration and science come together?

PH: There’s been a transition in polar exploration from it being merely an adventurous activity for fulfilling one’s personal ambitions, to something beyond.

The north and south poles were reached in the first decade of the 1900s. Traditional explorers went about finding resources for their monarchs, courts, governments and so on. In the process of discovering these resources such as gold and spices, they mapped where everything was, all the major features of the planet – the river systems , mountain ranges, coastlines, icesheets and deserts.

The role of modern exploration is to gather data not resources, to help scientists understand how the natural world works. This has become more urgent than ever. There are so many of us now and our combined impact cannot be accommodated by the natural processes. We need to understand how the planet works if we are going to manage our relationship more effectively with it.

A lot of it can be done by regular scientific fieldwork, but at the sharp, scary end of fieldwork is exploration, and that’s where people like us come in and do things that no one else can.

BP: How do you prepare for such expeditions mentally and physically?

PH: I consider team selection to be very important. Very few people in the world have sufficient experience, skills and willingness to go through the extremity of working in the Arctic ocean and sea ice. So our potential pool of explorers is very small.

What we look for is people who can not only operate technically but have the commitment deep within and passion to do the science.

Anne Daniels, Pen Hadow & Martin Hadley

Just to be able to survive and travel is what most expeditions do, but then to add another layer of surveying all the time as you’re travelling at night and when you’ve got the camp up – there are very few people who can do that.

People often ask, how much of it is physical and how much of it is mental? I’d say that when you put in the months over many years, 70% to 80% of whether you achieve your objectives is because of what goes on in your head and what sort of person you are.

Most people don’t realise that the main challenge in a polar expedition is that we have to operate in winter-spring which is the coldest period of the year. It’s important to recognise and deal with the fact that the cold affects the brain function. You behave as if you’re drunk and you’re drunk for 70 days in a hazardous environment, following a policy of zero tolerance to any mistakes of any scale, while performing at a level of physicality that has never been done before. That’s a pretty ambitious and difficult cocktail.

BP: What were the physical challenges you faced during your expeditions?

PH: The physical challenges are immense. We lose about half a pound in weight every day so we have to put on extra weight before we set off. After about two weeks, we need our muscles to pull these very heavy sledges which weigh about 120 to 150 kgs, full of our fuel, food, tent, communication equipment and so on.

The trouble after about two weeks is that you’re not able to drag enough food in the sledge, to replace all the energy you have burnt. We average about 7,500 calories a day, but can only eat about 6,000 calories, so after the second week the body says its in crisis and breaks down muscle to reduce its metabolic rate. So you’re losing the very part of the body that you need the most, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

Arctic Polar Bears - threatened by melting ice

I’ve had 35 encounters with polar bears over the last 18 years, during the 15 or so expeditions that I’ve done. The closest I’ve been to a bear was just outside my tent. There wasn’t enough time to pick up a gun to shoot or scare it off. The first thing I could grab was a saucepan which I threw at the it. The pan hit the bear near the eyebrow, and it was really surprised and ran off. Polar bears assume you’re a seal, you probably smell like one without a shower for months, so for a seal to attack a bear was a novel experience. But it was the noise of the saucepan that freaked it out!

The real challenge is what goes on in your head. It’s critical to keep calm, sensible, mature and not panic when your progress is not as good as you need it to be or when the conditions of the weather or the sea ice surface are difficult. There are good days and bad days. So you tell yourself, “It’s OK to have a few bad days.”

I’ve often said polar exploration is really about putting one foot in front of the other, and an awful lot of times, interspersed with cups of tea.

BP: What is the objective of the Catlin Arctic Survey?

PH: It is to advance the public understanding of climate change. Each year we have a focus. In 2009, it was to help scientists to understand better, and forecast more precisely how long it would be before there was no sea ice in summer time on the Arctic ocean.

What we’re doing as explorers is to try and help the scientists with raw data, because only we can access the particular kind of information they need. A satellite can help measure thickness of the ice but it uses compromised data sets, as it uses secondary information to estimates the volume of ice.

PH: We started on the 1st of March 2009 at 81 degrees North, 270 nautical miles to the North Pole which took us over 70 days to cover. The sun didn’t come up for the first two weeks, and we had to use our head torches for visibility. Sometimes we had to swim with our sledges.

Ann Daniels and Pen Hadow taking measurements

Every night when we set up camp, we went out and actually measured the thickness of the ice. We’d call up the people crunching the data for us, give them the location and ask, “How thick do you expect the ice to be?” So they might say, “2 and a half metres thick.” We’d find that it would be about 1 ½ metres thick. This happened for about 90% of the journey – the ice we found was much thinner than expected.

We had taken about 6000 observations and measured every single surface feature. The sea ice in the area was traditionally thought to be composed of older and thicker ice, but we found that the ice on the ridges was newer, and more prone to summertime melting.

BP: What are the implications of the findings?

PH: It put on block, hard evidence that supported unpublished work of the sea ice community. It made the IPCC 2007 work seriously out of whack – it was too conservative and out of date. The IPCC predicted that the first ice free summer would be between 2050 and 2100. Prof. Peter Wadham from the University of Cambridge’s Polar Oceans Physics Group revised the date of Arctic ice free summer, nearer to between 2030 and 2040. There will come a time where we will no longer have a year round cover of ice on the Arctic ocean, perhaps in 100 to 300 years.

Polar ice cap melt : NRDC

When you’re in outer space and look back at the earth, you can recognise the green of the landmass, the blue of the oceans and the white top and bottom of the poles. It is a rare visual cue to what global climate change is doing to our planet.

It would be foolish to think that this white lid going away in summer time will not have implications. The polar ice is a white layer reflecting about 80% percent of solar radiation. When the layer is gone there will be a net gain of 70% percent in energy absorption.

That implies a major environmental state change – the polar caps that provide a cooling service to the planet, especially to the northern hemisphere, is being removed by the carbon emissions that we are generating.

It’s not the melting sea ice itself which will push up sea levels. The upper levels of the Arctic ocean expands as the waters get warmer and this raises sea levels. About 30% of sea level rise over the last 200 years is because of warming of the upper layer of the oceans.

Also, the warmer waters that are accumulating in the Arctic oceans around the North Pole are making the huge amounts of ice currently on the land of Greenland slip into the sea. This is what is really going to push up sea levels.

When the IPCC report estimated that sea levels will rise by 20- 60 cm by 2100, it didn’t take into account Greenland ice and Antarctic ice sheet. When sea ice melts, there is no net rise in sea level, but when land ice melts, that’s new water entering the oceans. If you start adding what they are now observing with Greenland, this could be nearer a 1 metre estimated sea level rise by 2100.

The weather patterns in the northern hemisphere are driven substantially by the temperature difference or gradient between the relatively cold north and the warmer tropical waters. With the disappearing Arctic ice, this temperature gradient is reduced, and the engine that drives the weather system is weakened. So there will be weather changes, big and small.

BP: What does this imply for Asia?

PH: We need to make the most of this warning of what is happening. Not having this protective white lid has big implications for the northern hemisphere right down to the equator where you are at Singapore. For Asia, the consequences of this sea ice disappearing, will be an accelerated sea level rise.

IPCC 2007 mentioned that low lying coastal communities are going to be impacted by this rising sea level. This is not a ‘maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t’ phenomenon. Sea levels are rising, and accelerating in their rising. The 5 nations with the most people – the low lying coastal areas are in Asia – China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Indonesia. This is one big consequence of climate change in Asia.

In and around Eastern Asia, 2009-2010 was relatively cold and snowy in winter. This weather system was a result of changed wind patterns which in turn was a response to the warming of air around the North Pole – where we are seeing temperature rises happening at 2-3 times the average global rate. We can only expect more cold and snowy winters in East Asia.

Another consequence is that ocean currents are starting to change. This has an impact for the timing of monsoons in Asia and the weather that’s associated with the monsoons. People can’t be specific at the moment and scientists are working really hard to forecast this to the best of their ability. What is going to happen and where, how big are the changes going to be, is hard to tell as it’s a massively complex thing. But one thing is for sure – it is going to impact a lot of people.

PH: Climate change is about risk management. And as I told the insurance industry at the seminar, I know all about risk management. If I don’t manage risk, I don’t come back alive.

Everyone knows about sports sponsorship, art and music sponsorship. A new sector is environmental sponsorship. Almost every businesses need to improve its environmental credentials and to communicate to all its key stakeholders what it is doing. An increasing number of businesses have surged ahead in their industry sector to becoming more sustainable. Sometimes they find it hard to get a return on investment with some of the stakeholders particularly from their customers and clients.

The problem we have identified is that what they are doing ‘less bad’ which is not really inspiration. There is opportunity for business to do ‘more good’. Get on the front foot. Do not necessarily look for an environmental program that is very relevant to your business alone – but for the greater good of the environment. That sort of indirect dislocation from your business, can really enhance the perception of how people see your business.

BP: What action needs to be taken immediately to avert a catastrophe?

PH: Individuals, households, businesses and government – we all in our own way need to share and increase people’s understanding, believe that these things are really happening and we are bringing them about.

Even if we are not – and I believe they are – the changes are happening, and are going to happen. Let’s start working out how we are going to deal with it, don’t wait till it has happened in a big bad way. Get organised now for coping with the situation.

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com. She is passionate about the role of individuals and communities in bringing about the much needed change we need to see in the world. She was an economist in her previous avatar, and is now an environmental and social justice activist using social media as well as offline community participation in her advocacy of a greener, fairer and happier planet. She writes and conducts talks and workshops on sustainability and can be contacted at bhavani[at]ecowalkthetalk.com. Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook,Twitter, Linked IN and YouTube

Further links you may be interested in:

1. Catlin Atlantic Survey will be conducting its next expedition in 2011. To find out more, please visit their website at CatlinArcticSurvey.com The objective of the 2011 expedition is to collect data on Thermohaline circulation. According to the website, “ The Arctic plays a crucial role in driving thermohaline circulation – powerful ocean currents that circulate warm and cold water around the world’s oceans. These currents have a major impact on Earth’s climate and weather patterns. While a number of processes drive thermohaline circulation, there are a few that are unique to the Arctic. Further data on these will help scientists determine how important the Arctic is to thermohaline circulation, and what changes are taking place.”